Countdown to a nuclear clock: a three minute guide

Precise timekeeping helps us in our daily lives: from pinpointing your precise location with GPS to synchronising financial deals to the millisecond, and physicists are also seeking ever more accurate measurements of time, as super-accurate clocks could help make planet-sized telescopes, hunt for dark matter or even monitor the shape of the planet from the air.

So researchers are working on a nuclear clock – a device that would harness the energy levels of the nucleus of an atom to act as a timekeeper.

Now, they’ve got closer than ever, by making extremely accurate measurements of the frequency of light required to push thorium nuclei into a higher energy state – potentially defining the tick of a future nuclear clock.

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